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Donald
Trump and Kamala Harris
Donald Trump and Kamala Harris launch a
frantic tour of swing states Wednesday in the final week of the campaign for
the US presidency, a day after the vice president told a huge crowd outside the
White House that her rival was unstable and itching for unbridled power.
Harris will travel to North Carolina and then
to Pennsylvania, focusing again on two of seven battleground states that could
determine who wins the closest, oddest and most consequential election in
modern US history.
For weeks the race has been locked in a statistical
dead heat.
North Carolina has not voted for a Democratic
president since it went with Barack Obama in 2008, and in a sign of how hotly
contested it is, Trump will be in that same state on Wednesday -- in the town
of Rocky Mount, about an hour's drive from Harris's Raleigh rally.
Trump has a second rally planned in yet
another swing state, Wisconsin in the Midwest, where he will appear with Brett
Favre, an American football legend.
As Trump struggled to deal with the fallout
from a self-inflicted wound over the weekend that infuriated Latino voters, a
key demographic, Harris gave a powerful closing argument speech in a highly
symbolic setting.
She spoke at the very spot in
Washington where Trump stirred up a mob that went on to attack the US Capitol on
January 6, 2021, hoping to keep him in power even though he lost the 2020
election to Joe Biden.
"This is someone who is unstable,
obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked
power," Harris said.
But the vice president also gave an
optimistic vision of the United States' future, using the setting of the White
House lit up against the black sky behind her as a symbolic pitch to show that
she is ready for the presidency.
"America, I am here tonight to
say: that's not who we are," Harris told the huge crowd of flag-waving
supporters, who cheered often.
'Turn the page'
"Each of you has the power to turn
the page, and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story
ever told."
Harris's campaign claimed 75,000 people
attended the rally. The number could not be immediately verified, but the crowd
was unusually big in an election that has already seen heavy enthusiasm on both
sides.
Trump held a rally Tuesday evening in
Allentown, Pennsylvania and remained on the defensive after a comedian who
spoke at his weekend event in Madison Square Garden in New York described
Puerto Rico, a US territory in the Caribbean, as "a floating island of
garbage."
It was a potentially catastrophic dud
of a joke at a rally that featured a spate of racist and misogynistic comments
from the podium.
The comment infuriated American
Latinos, in particular Puerto Ricans, who number some 400,000 in Pennsylvania,
the battleground state seen as the most important of all.
In his rally Tuesday night, Trump
engaged in damage control, saying "nobody loves our Latino community and
our Puerto Rico community more than I do."
Biden made a gaffe of his own Tuesday
night about comedian Tony Hinchcliffe's derogatory comment on Puerto Rico,
appearing to refer to Trump's supporters as "garbage" during an
election campaign call.
"The only garbage I see floating
out there is his supporters," said Biden. "His, his, his demonization
of Latinos is unconscionable and it's un-American."
In a statement, the White House said
Biden was referring to Trump's rhetoric, not to his supporters.
The Trump campaign seized on the
comments, with the candidate himself calling them "terrible."
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